The Mortalist

At 11 o’clock in the morning of Saturday, May 17, 25-year-old Guy Edward Bartkus detonated a bomb in the car in which he sat, outside a fertility clinic in Palm Springs, California. The clinic was damaged but the fertilized embryos, we are told, were saved. And although four people were slightly injured, the only fatality was Bartkus, who was blasted to pieces.

That was in accordance with his principles. Like most random shooters and bombers in this narcissistic age, Bartkus left behind a manifesto that has now vanished from the web; all quotations come from my copy of it. (In another typical move, he had hoped to livestream the bombing but was prevented by equipment failure.)

He was, he said, a “pro mortalist”—an advocate of death. The goal of the mortalist is to “begin the process of sterilizing the planet of the disease of life.” He meant that literally. Not only should the human race, with all its hopes and dreams, be exterminated for its own good, but so should the innocent beasts that walk, fly and swim among us.

“I think we need a war against pro-lifers,” Bartkus wrote to explain the attack on the clinic. “It is clear at this point that these people aren’t only stupid, they simply do not care about the harm they are perpetuating by being willing agents for a DNA molecule. This should not be seen as tolerable to any intelligent and caring person.”